What is NATO?

It is quite a thing to watch Trump complain that NATO “wasn’t there”, as if the last twenty years can be quietly mislaid like a set of car keys.

NATO invoked Article 5 after 9/11 and spent years alongside the United States in Afghanistan. That is not a debatable point. It is the central fact of the alliance in the modern era. Yet we are invited to ignore it and pivot instead to Greenland, which turns out to be the real grievance.

At which point the argument stops being wrong and starts being confused. Greenland belongs to Denmark, Denmark is in NATO, and Article 6 makes it perfectly clear that the alliance is about external threats, not helping one member acquire bits of another.

What is being presented, in effect, is NATO rewritten to suit the complaint. A treaty that behaves differently, applies differently, and obliges allies in ways it never has. Then, when the real one refuses to play along, it is accused of failure.

It is like insisting Pride and Prejudice is about a scientist creating a monster, and then criticising it for not having enough electricity and laboratory equipment. You are not analysing the book. You are confusing it with Frankenstein.

The difficulty is that this only works if nobody opens the cover. A single, basic, journalistic question would do. Which part of Article 5 was not honoured, and where does Article 6 support this idea about Greenland?

There is a long pause after that, because there is no clean answer.

Instead, we carry on as if this is a serious disagreement about policy rather than a basic mix-up about what NATO is. The alliance has not changed. The text has not changed. What has changed is the willingness to pretend that words mean something else when it is politically convenient.